How Poetry Ruined My Life

On a book I didn't write and a book I did

Cover art: Marjorie Welish, Small High Valley 20 (1988)

Poetry hasn’t ruined my life. But How Poetry Ruined My Life is the title of a book I never wrote. I sketched out a short proposal for it almost exactly ten years ago, in middle of the one period of severe depression I’ve known in my adult life. This lasted for about three months, until I came out of it thanks to the support of family, friends, therapy and anti-depressants. In the middle of it, I felt awful: I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t think straight, I thought everything was about to end — on bright sunny days — in catastrophe. I felt I understood the inside of the phrase “nervous breakdown”.

It had various causes, the most obvious being the death of my Dad the year before, and the death of my Mum seven years before that, while I was a PhD student. But the cause I focused on — perhaps because it was rather less complicated than the loss of both my parents — was my forthcoming book, The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry.

By the time it went to press, I hated that book — or, rather, I hated myself for having produced it. For anyone who hasn’t dipped in recently, it’s a 700-page biographical dictionary of Anglophone poets, living and dead. I certainly didn’t write all of it. But in 2011, I signed a contract with Oxford University Press, undertaking

to prepare a new edition of The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English by adding 50,000 new words, which includes updates and revisions of existing entries and new entries. Changes will seek to redress the current UK-bias in the text and will include entries on poets from English-speaking territories and poets who have gained prominence since […] the last edition

Was this a good idea? The first edition, published in 1994, was edited by the poet Ian Hamilton, with the help of a “day-to-day” assistant. Hamilton, a famously acerbic critic, didn’t write any entries himself though: he contracted a long and starry list of contributors, even managing to get an entry on Robert Lowell from Seamus Heaney. Those were the pre-internet days when a reference work carried weight.

Cover art: Henri Matisse, The Conversation (1909)

I didn’t have an assistant, though I did have the internet. Eventually I realised I needed other contributors, who were expert in other countries and poetries. But I didn’t have a contributor budget — everyone who contributed did so in return for one hardback copy — and still wrote the majority of new entries myself.

When I took the job on, a poet whose opinion I admired said what he thought: “hackwork”. And he was right. The only way to get it done was to keep chipping away at little summaries, little corrections, little insights. It was enjoyable at first: research days in the Poetry Library at the South Bank, leafing through rare small-press collections within sight of the Thames. Later, it was gruelling: proof-reading hundreds of double-column pages in the middle of the night at the kitchen table.

After two years I had a head full of chippings about poets and — I was convinced — a manifestly terrible book; a crime against criticism; a work of hackwork to make even hacks throw away their hand tools. And to make it worse, after all the proof-reading, it was fully uploaded into my head: I could accuse myself at any waking minute of some oversight, and mentally flick to the relevant entry like a card index. It got into my dreams too: one night, I woke convinced that two prize-winning poets were waiting outside under a streetlamp with a black sack to go over my head.

A kindly academic colleague, who saw me at my lowest point, suggested I might find some solace through self-knowledge by reading Freud’s essay on “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). I did — there I was on every page, “the melancholic”:

The essential thing […] is not whether the melancholic’s distressing self-denigration is correct, in the sense that his self-criticism agrees with the opinion of other people. The point must rather be that he is giving a correct description of his psychological situation. He has lost his self-respect and he must have good reason for this.

And I do have a good reason for it, I thought — I’ve produced this terrible book that poets are going to burn at readings. I need to apologise to everyone involved, forever.

Looking back, a decade on, I feel fairly sure that I was — on balance — wrong. I had suffered a loss of self-respect, and it was partly because I’d spent so much time typing up search-engine summaries of publications and prizes rather than (say) turning my PhD into an academic monograph. But the few reviews the book got were nice enough. And the update really did redress the glaring biases of the first edition (the entry for Kingsley Amis, for example, was twice as long as that for Gertrude Stein). Only a handful of poets got in touch to complain about not being included (and one was mistaken — he just couldn’t see his entry on the Google Books preview). And… that was it.

So I never wrote the book called How Poetry Ruined My Life, which is probably just as well, because its premise was entirely inside my head. But what I’ve done since — and what I’m trying to do now, with Some Flowers Soon — has in various ways been an attempt not to make the same mistake again. In a diary I kept at the time, I tried to describe what I would like to do as penance for the “thin prose, joining facts” of the Companion:

to write about the world through poetry […[ to try to connect the reader with the thing […] the sense of a world packed away, to be unfolded

So, that’s the plan.

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NOTES

This is — I think — the first post going out to paid subscribers (I pressed the button this morning to convert pledges into subscriptions, but apparently this can take a few days). Thank you to everyone who felt they could support my plan to work one day a week on Some Flowers Soon — I’m really looking forward to seeing what will result. Feel free to let me know how you think it’s going! Emails very welcome.

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I still can’t entirely bring myself to hold up an entry from the Companion as a piece of writing I’m proud of. But I was quite happy at the time — if only because it meant the end was in sight, and I finally got to write a piece of extended prose in my own voice — with the Introduction. Here are the opening paragraphs, and a later one:

The first edition of this unique guide to English-language poets from the last hundred years is itself nearly twenty years old. In the process of bringing it up to date, the final line of a poem by my predecessor, Ian Hamilton, has often come to mind: “The trellis that needs fixing, that I’ll fix” (“The Forties”). Disorderly as a garden, a reference work on living writers and reputations comes with a never-ending To Do list. Anthology editors may gather the blooms, but the Companion under-gardener has pruning, planting, and fixing to do.

Of the various changes that have been made to this second edition, the most prominent is the title: The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry is now The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry. Coverage extends to the first decade of the twenty-first century, while the starting-point for inclusion by publication has been brought forward to 1910: the year when, among other auspicious events for poetic modernity, T. S. Eliot began “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, Gertrude Stein wrote her verse-portrait of Picasso, and Thomas Hardy asked a “crocus root”, stirring for spring, “How do you know?” (“The Year’s Awakening”).

[…]

It seems time to declare the judgements I have made in editing “Hamilton”, metonym and man. I echo him in hoping that this second edition “will be seen as serious and useful”, but read for entertainment, too. It is, after all, the delights of poetry that we are talking about here. At the same time, I have tried to maximize its interest for those readers and students who (like me) consider the last hundred years of Anglophone poetry a major literary epoch. I have, therefore, left in the twentieth century a number of novelists not remembered for their verse; a number of poets whose claim to inclusion seemed predominantly historical (e.g. Second World War combatants); and various one-offs such as a lone songwriter (Bob Dylan), and a lone place, “Fitzrovia”—a nod, perhaps, to the literary London where the networks of the first edition were established. I have also removed, replaced, or sought to temper entries which seemed more suited in tone to a bar-room dismissal, and even, in some cases, calculated to start a brawl.

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You can read Ian Hamilton’s poem “The Forties” here: https://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.com/2010/04/collected-poems-of-ian-hamilton.html